Like most practicing poets, I have received gift poems I didn’t look in the mouth, and, at such moments I have applauded Allen Ginsberg’s advice, “First thought best thought.” Yes, the literary equivalent of the superego—whatever a poet’s may be—can spell death to poems. That being-in-the-moment of composition can result in images, sounds and rhythms that are melded with feeling-subject-tone in a way that can’t be created at a later point. That trance-like feeling, that delightful absorption in the very act of writing should not be broken by self-critical over-thinking.

Judy Z. Kronenfeld (Courtesy photo)

But the practicing poet needs to perceive whether that gifted poem is complete, or is a first draft requiring re-seeing, re-vision. Sometimes, the very passion that led to the poem and surprised with unexpected words, images, and structure, can be blinding as well. It may take some time (hours, days, weeks, months or longer—probably depending on the poet’s writing experience) for her to approach reading what she wrote as if she were a stranger—someone who doesn’t know her from a space alien—or even as if she were her older self—someone who no longer remembers the specific experience, emotions and thoughts that led to the poem. Sometimes the personal assumptions and obsessions that power a first draft can also obscure elements of the poem, and prevent it from reaching readers; tweaks or more substantive revision may be needed to let the reader in, while preserving the poem’s individuality and force. Poems can feel “indulgent” when they include very personal assumptions and details which have not been made part of their fabrics, and thus block the reader’s full-hearted entry. A poem, as William Carlos Williams famously said, “is a small (or large) machine made of words.” And that, I assume, means it is a made thing that works. A poem has an impact, it is something felt, as well as understood. Lately I find myself asking myself about some of my own poems as I work on them: Have you fully let the reader in? What, finally, is this about? Posing the latter question helps me to see whether there is a unity in my poem, however many (hopefully surprising) turns it takes.

These subtle and delicate machines in words surely do not come with instruction manuals or rules that apply like templates. For example: yes, it is frequently true that “Less is more,” as the adage goes. Revising a recent poem. I felt how clearly an adjective, or a phrase I added to a line, knocked the power out of the adjective and phrase already there. In a different short poem, I found that adding just a third “and” at the head of a line was enough to inject a “bardic” tone that sounded pretentious and out of place. But, of course, less can also be less; anaphora and piled-on lists of examples are used powerfully in such long, expansive poems as Walt Whitman’s, Ginsberg’s and Christopher Smart’s.

Prior experience with such “machines” does not guarantee facility in fixing the unique specimen the poet has before her. But having fixed scores of unique machines improves the odds that she will be more readily able to see what’s going awry in the one she last constructed. I personally find that the more I practice poetry and the older I get, the earlier “craft” enters into the process of a poem; and some of that craft is so embedded in my consciousness that it doesn’t even feel conscious.

Still, there is no one way to fix one’s “small (or large) machine made of words.” A degree of Keatsian “negative capability” is required to write in a world in which writing and revision are necessarily filled with mystery and uncertainty and there can be no “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” My own ideas about revision are always subject to revision. Recently, unusually, I drafted and completed a poem in less than one day because of a deadline; I totally re-conceptualized the first draft, and then edited and polished it several times before submission. But, fortunately, it was submitted—rather than placed on top of my “to consider further” pile, where it might conceivably have been revised into extinction—because it was accepted the next day.

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